Investigation of New Protection Mechanisms and Protocols for Security and Privacy of Smart Grid

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The smart grid is a next generation power network system in which the generation, transmission, distribution, and management of electricity are upgraded and automated by incorporating advanced computing and communication technologies for improving the efficiency, reliability, economics, and safety of the grid. It consists of a collection of meters/sensors and controllers/actuators that communicate, usually wirelessly, with a substation/data concentrator, and various third party entities. A smart meter measures real time data of energy consumption, and transmits the data to the substation and potentially to a home area network. Communication between the smart devices and the substation is done usually with the ZigBee Smart Energy 1.x Profile, WiFi, or power line carrier (PLC). Communication between smart devices and a home area network typically uses WiFi, ZigBee, Ethernet, HomePlug, or Wireless MBus. The substation communicates with the utility company’s central servers through a wide area network (WAN) using wired connections, WiFi, satellite, or cellular. The smart grid holds enormous promise for improved efficiency, convenience, and sustainability; but it also pose a large risk for the security and privacy of the citizens and companies that depend upon them. Except it inherits all the existing cyber attacks on communication networks, smart grid is uniquely distinguished from all the information technologies (IT) networks or banking network systems in terms of the nature of attacks. The objective of an attacker may not be just gaining unauthorized information, it may exploit a wide range of cyber and physical layer attacks, which result in potentially making erroneous decisions on contingency analysis, dispatch, billing, or leading to a remote termination feature to blackout a region. The challenges for securing smart grid are stems from (a) wireless link runs on smart devices (e.g. ZigBee devices) with limited computational power, compared with smart phones, laptops, and desktop computers, and it requests real time response, (b) the heavy dependence on the heterogeneity of the communication network, (c ) the weak protection of the devices in the field to physical layer attacks, and (d) state estimation of control systems heavily relies on GPS (Global Positioning System) timing signals which are not integrity check protected. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate a new paradigm in terms of the integration of crypto engine, randomness, transmission and modulation, code signalling, and the space redundancy of pervasiveness of ZigBee smart energy devices to provide lightweight unified protection on confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, and privacy preserving data aggregation with detection and anti-physical layer attacks for smart grid. The secure operation and communication in smart grid are important to prevent financial fraud, environmental accidents, and a host of other potentially disasterous incidents. The proposed research will provide state of the art research on privacy and security of smart grid communication and can help to provide insight into the right mix of secure communications technologies for smart grid deployments in their evolving process, which will benefit academic research, industrial activities and government agencies.